A REVIEW OF
Much Depends on Dinner:
The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils
and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal
By Margaret Visser, McClelland & Stewart,
1986
Most people will salivate just from watching
someone else sucking on a lemon, but introverts salivate more in response
to lemon juice than extroverts do. And speaking of spittle, natives
of Peru produce a beer called chicha by chewing corn kernels, expectorating,
and then allowing the maltose and glucose captured in their saliva
to ferment. These are among the hundreds of food facts in Margaret
Visser's endlessly entertaining book Much Depends On Dinner;
some passages may whet your appetite, while others will perhaps turn
your stomach.
Visser remarks that boredom is a pervasive
disease in our culture, and she feels that we are bored because
we have lost sight of our connections to our world and our
history. Her book, she says, "is a modest plea for the realization
that absolutely nothing is intrinsically boring, least of all
the everyday, ordinary things." And so she concocts a simple
everyday meal, and then serves up 350 pages worth of fascinating
information about the nine foodstuffs on her menu.
For the record, her menu is buttered
corn with salt, chicken with rice, lettuce with olive oil and
lemon juice, and ice cream. This meal, like our polyglot culture,
is not indigenous to any region or climate of the earth, and
certainly not to Canada. To some philosophers of food, such
an anomaly would rank as the foremost topic of discussion,
but Visser is not on a crusade to change our diets, though
she would like us to be more aware of the things we eat and
how we have come to eat them.
She is consistently illuminating in describing
the mix of luck, ingenuity, and centuries of hard work it took
us to develop our staple foods. Her expositions of plant genetics
and agricultural techniques can be enjoyed by anyone interested
in the contents of their supper plate. Beyond that, the book
is a well-written but loosely organized collection of miscellany.
We learn about labour relations in California lettuce fields
and packing plants, but not about the politics of olive-picking,
though we are treated to a long discussion of the annointing
of monarchs with olive oil. Visser enters the animal rights
controversy with a description of conditions in modern poultry
factories, but says nothing about the way modern dairies handle
the cows who give us our butter and ice cream. On nutrition,
too, there are gaps: there is little mention of the role of
refined sugar in the Western diet, though sugar is a principal
ingredient of the ice cream we eat for dessert.
But as Visser quite rightly remarks in
her introduction, it would be easy to write a whole book on
each of the foods she discusses, and thoroughness would require
her to greatly limit the scope of the book. To her credit,
even her lengthy digressions often cast light on her more central
concerns. Her chapter on corn, for instance, has little to
say about sweet corn, the first item on her menu, because on
a world scale sweet corn is a minor crop. Instead, we learn
about cultures which rely on corn as a daily staple, while
our society uses corn mostly as food for farm animals, thereby
consuming much more of the golden grain then we could possibly
ingest directly. Similarly, her concluding chapter on ice cream
provides an occasion to examine the surprisingly short history
of the use of cold to preserve meat, dairy products and vegetables.
The anthropology of everyday life, as
Visser terms her work, is relatively unexplored terrain. Certainly
few writers have offered us so much information about our primary
needs in such a palatable form. Her book may raise as many
questions as it answers, but that is the point of the recipe
-- to get us to question the things we usually take for granted.
This review was published in the Globe & Mail, October 25, 1986
